Great Throughts Treasury

"Human happiness does not consist in satisfying one’s personal wishes but in the certainty of being needed, in having the visions of goals still unattained." - Abraham Joshua Heschel

"It can even come about that a created will cancels out, not perhaps the exertion, but the result of divine action; for in this sense, God himself has told us that God wishes things which do not happen because man does not wish them! Thus the rights of men are immense, and his greatest misfortune is to be unaware of them." - Joseph de Maistre, fully Joseph-Marie, comte de Maistre

"Theoretically, religion wishes to make men serene and inwardly peaceful by reaching a loving and forgiving god. But in practice, there is too much undissolved wrath and punishment in most religions." - Joshua L. Liebman, fully Joshua Loth Liebman

"He who wishes to be rich in a day will be hanged in a year." - Leonardo da Vinci, fully Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci

"A talent for truth is real property. If a man loves truth better than things, people like to be around where he is. Almost everybody wishes he could be honest, but you can’t have the spirit of truth when your heart is set on dickering for things." - Lloyd C. Douglas, fully Lloyd Cassel Douglas, born Doya C. Douglas

"We all have our own life to pursue, our own kind of dream to be weaving, and we all have the power to make wishes come true, as long as we keep believing." - Louisa May Alcott

"Adolescence is a time of active deconstruction, construction, reconstruction—a period in which past, present, and future are rewoven and strung together on the threads of fantasies and wishes that do not necessarily follow the laws of linear chronology. " - Louise J. Kaplan

"Man has many wishes that he does not really wish to fulfil, and it would be a misunderstanding to suppose the contrary. He wants them to remain wishes, they have value only in his imagination; their fulfilment would be a bitter disappointment to him. Such a desire is the desire for eternal life. If it were fulfilled, man would become thoroughly sick of living eternally, and yearn for death. In reality man wishes merely to avoid a premature, violent or gruesome death. Everything has its measure, says a pagan philosopher; in the end we weary of everything, even of life; a time comes when man desires death. Consequently there is nothing frightening about a normal, natural death, the death of a man who has fulfilled himself and lived out his life." - Ludwig Feuerbach, fully Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach

"He who only wishes and hopes does not interfere actively with the course of events and with the shaping of his own destiny." - Ludwig von Mises, fully Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises

"It is irrelevant to the entrepreneur, as the servant of the consumers, whether the wishes and wants of the consumers are wise or unwise, moral or immoral. He produces what the consumers want. In this sense he is amoral. He manufactures whiskey and guns just as he produces food and clothing. It is not his task to teach reason to the sovereign consumers. Should one entrepreneur, for ethical reasons of his own, refuse to manufacture whiskey, other entrepreneurs would do so as long as whiskey is wanted and bought. It is not because we have distilleries that people drink whiskey; it is because people like to drink whiskey that we have distilleries. One may deplore this. But it is not up to the entrepreneurs to improve mankind morally. And they are not to be blamed if those whose duty this is have failed to do so." - Ludwig von Mises, fully Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises

"The poor man wishes to conceal his poverty, and the rich man his wealth: the former fears lest he be despised, the latter lest he be plundered." - Maria Von Ebner-Eschenbach, or Marie von Ebner-Eschenbachová, Marie Freifrau von Ebner-Eschenbach

"We never do what we wish when we wish it, and when we desire a thing earnestly, and it does arrive, that or we are changed, so that we slide from the summit of our wishes and find ourselves where we were" - Mary Shelley, née Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin

"[In] the realm of science... what we have achieved will be obsolete in ten, twenty or fifty years. That is the fate, indeed, that is the very meaning of scientific work. ... Every scientific “fulfillment” raises new “questions” and cries out to be surpassed rendered obsolete. Everyone who wishes to serve science has to resign himself to this. " - Max Weber, formally Maximilian Carl Emil Weber

"He who wishes to be benevolent will not be rich." - Mencius, born Meng Ke or Ko NULL

"Love wishes to perpetuate itself. Love wishes for immortality." - Mortimer J. Adler, fully Mortimer Jerome Adler

"The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds." - Nancy Astor, fully Lady Nancy Witcher Astor, Viscountess Astor

"The barbarous custom of having men beaten who are suspected of having important secrets to reveal must be abolished. It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile. The poor wretches say anything that comes into their mind and what they think the interrogator wishes to know." - Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon I

"Who could understand how all things, though different contingently, are the image of that single, infinite Form... The infinite form is received only in a finite way; consequently, every creature is, as it were, a finite infinity or a created god, so that it exists in the way in which this could best be. It is as if the Creator had spoken: "Let it be made," and because God, who is eternity itself, could not be made, that was made which could be made, which would be as much like God as possible. The inference, therefore, is that every created thing as such is perfect, even if by comparison to others it seems less perfect. For the most merciful God communicates being to all in the manner in which it can be received... Therefore, every created being finds its rest in its own perfection, which it freely holds from the divine being. It desires to be no other created being, as if something else were more perfect, but rather it prefers that which it itself holds, as if a divine gift, from the maximum, and it wishes its own possession to be perfected and preserved incorruptibly." - Nicholas of Cusa, also Nicholas of Kues and Nicolaus Cusanus NULL

"When a dying man cries, it is not because of where he is going which he knows nothing about, but because of what he wishes he would have done in the world he is leaving behind." - Nigerian Proverbs

"Wherever I go I need a period of incubation so that I may learn the essence of nature, which never wishes to be understood or yield herself." - Paul Gaugin, fully Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin

"A man who wishes to impose his opinions on others is unsure of their value. He has to uphold them by all possible means. He adopts a special tone of voice, thumps the table, smiles on some and browbeats others. In short, he borrows from his body the wherewithal to bolster up his mind." - Paul Valéry, fully Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry

"What I got was not so much gifts and wishes come trues but a feeling of peace. I got peace itself, actually. And when you have peace, you can be strong; and when you are strong, you can get through what you have to get through, and not with exhaustion and frown marks and slumped shoulders but with relative happiness, and humor, and sometimes even gaiety. " - Peggy Noonan, born Margaret Ellen Noonan

"Communism is oppression and slavery. Man is very willing to obey the law of duty, serve his country, and oblige his friends; but he wishes to labor when he pleases, where he pleases, and as much as he pleases. He wishes to dispose of his own time, to be governed only by necessity, to choose his friendships, his recreation, and his discipline; to act from judgment, not by command; to sacrifice himself through selfishness, not through servile obligation. Communism is essentially opposed to the free exercise of our faculties, to our noblest desires, to our deepest feelings. Any plan which could be devised for reconciling it with the demands of the individual reason and will would end only in changing the thing while preserving the name. Now, if we are honest truth-seekers, we shall avoid disputes about words." - Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

"Man is very willing to obey the law of duty, serve his country, and oblige his friends; but he wishes to labor when he pleases, where he pleases, and as much as he pleases... to act from judgment, not by command." - Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

"That which distinguishes him from the figurative artist is the fact that in his creations he frees himself from individual sentiments and from particular impressions which he receives from outside, and that he breaks loose from the domination of the individual inclination within him. It is therefore equally wrong to think that the non-figurative artist creates through ‘the pure intention of his mechanical process,’ that he makes ‘calculated abstractions,’ and that he wishes to ’suppress sentiment not only in himself but also in the spectator.’ It is a mistake to think that he retires completely into his system. That which is regarded as a system is nothing but constant obedience to the laws of pure plastics, to necessity, which art demands from him. It is thus clear that he has not become a mechanic, but that the progress of science, of technique, of machinery, of life as a whole, has only made him into a living machine, capable of realizing in a pure manner the essence of art. In this way, he is in his creation sufficiently neutral, that nothing of himself or outside of him can prevent him from establishing that which is universal. Certainly his art is art for art’s sake … for the sake of the art which is form and content at one and the same time." - Piet Mondrian, fully Pieter Cornelis "Piet" Mondriaan, after 1906 Mondrian

"The religion of the Sufi is not separate from the religions of the world. People have fought in vain about the names and lives of their saviors, and have named their religions after the name of their savior, instead of uniting with each other in the truth that is taught. This truth can be traced in all religions, whether one community calls another pagan or infidel or heathen. Such persons claim that theirs is the only scripture, and their place of worship the only abode of God. Sufism is a name applied to a certain philosophy by those who do not accept the philosophy; hence it cannot really be described as a religion; it contains a religion but is not itself a religion. Sufism is a religion if one wishes to learn religion from it. But it is beyond religion, for it is the light, the sustenance of every soul, raising the mortal being to immortality." - Inayat Khan, aka Hazrat Inayat Khan, fully Pir-O-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan

"With the maturity of his soul, a man desires to probe the depths of life, he desires to discover the power latent within him, he longs to know the sources and goal of his life, he yearns to understand the aim and meaning of his life, he wishes to understand the inner significance of things, and he wants to uncover all that is covered by name and form. He seeks insight into cause and effect, he wants to touch the mystery of time and space, and he wishes to find the missing link between God and man — where man ends, where God begins." - Inayat Khan, aka Hazrat Inayat Khan, fully Pir-O-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan

"Rabbi Akiva used to say: “All is given against a pledge, and the net is cast over all living; the shop stands open and the shopkeeper gives credit and the account book lies open and the hand writes. Every one that wishes to borrow let him come and borrow; but the collectors go their daily rounds and exact payment from man with or without his consent; for the collectors have that on which they can rely; and the Judgment is a Judgment of truth; and all is made ready for a feast.”" - Pirke Avot, "Verses of the Fathers" or "Ethics of the Fathers" NULL

"Our wishes come true through the work that we do." - Plautus, full name Titus Maccius Plautus NULL

"That words, indeed, are not otherwise valuable than as subservient to things, must surely be acknowledged by every liberal mind, and will alone be disputed by him who has spent the prime of his life, and consumed the vigour of his understanding, in verbal criticisms and grammatical trifles. And, if this is the case, every lover of truth will only study a language for the purpose of procuring the wisdom it contains; and will doubtless wish to make his native language the vehicle of it to others. For, since all truth is eternal, its nature can never be altered by transposition, though by this means its dress may be varied, and become less elegant and refined. Perhaps even this inconvenience may be remedied by sedulous cultivation; at least, the particular inability of some, ought not to discourage the well-meant endeavours of others. Whoever reads the lives of the ancient Heroes of Philosophy, must be convinced that they studied things more than words, and that Truth alone was the ultimate object of their search; and he who wishes to emulate their glory and participate their wisdom, will study their doctrines more than their language, and value the depth of their understandings far beyond the elegance of their composition. The native charms of Truth will ever be sufficient to allure the truly philosophic mind; and he who has once discovered her retreats will surely endeavour to fix a mark by which they may be detected by others." - Plotinus NULL

"Ours will be the task of defining and explaining the notions of the most important truths… as well as that of leading back to the rule and straight path of honesty both in public and in private life, in the social and political spheres, all men and, indeed, each and every one of them, those who must obey as well as those whose duty is to command, for they are all sons of the same Father Who is in Heaven. We are also quite conscious of the fact that some will be shocked in hearing Us mention that We will, through necessity, concern Ourselves with politics. But anyone seeking to judge fairly will be quick to understand that the Sovereign Pontiff, who has been invested with the Supreme Magisterium, has no right whatsoever of divorcing questions relating to politics from the field of Faith and Morals. Moreover, in his capacity as chief and sovereign guide of that perfect society which is the Catholic Church, a society made up of men and also set up amongst men, he can only wish to foster and entertain close relationships with [all] heads of countries and members of governments if he wishes to see all the countries of the world protect their Catholic citizens' liberty and security." - Pope Pius X, aka Saint Pope Pius X and Pope of the Eucharist, born Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto NULL

"Our contempt for egoists begins very early in life. Children who fulfill their parents' conscious or unconscious wishes are good, but if they ever refuse to do so or express wishes of their own that go against those of their parents they are called egoistic and inconsiderate. It usually does not occur to the parents that they might need and use the child to fulfill their own egoistic wishes. They often are convinced that they must teach their child how to behave because it is their duty to help him along on the road to socialization. If a child bought up this way does not wish to lose his parents' love (And what child can risk that?), he must learn very early to share, to give, to make sacrifices, and to be willing to do without and forgo gratification-long before he is capable of true sharing or of the real willingness to do without." - Alice Miller, née Rostovski

"Everything that the human race has done and thought is concerned with the satisfaction of deeply felt needs and the assuagement of pain. One has to keep this constantly in mind if one wishes to understand spiritual movements and their development. Feeling and longing are the motive force behind all human endeavor and human creation, in however exalted a guise the latter may present themselves to us." - Albert Einstein

"The idea of the State of Israel does not comply with the wishes of my heart. I do not understand why the engine needs to such a state. The nation-state is a bad idea was opposed by all the time. We imitate Europe, which devastated Europe in the end is nationalism. " - Albert Einstein

"Whom fortune wishes to destroy she first makes mad." - Publius Syrus

"It is the public that is being asked to assume the risks...the public must decide whether it wishes to continue on the present road and it can only do so when in full possession of the facts." - Rachel Carson, fully Rachel Louise Carson

"The public must decide whether it wishes to continue." - Rachel Carson, fully Rachel Louise Carson

"FALLING STARS: Do you remember still the falling stars that like swift horses through the heavens raced and suddenly leaped across the hurdles of our wishes -- do you recall? And we did make so many! For there were countless numbers of stars: each time we looked above we were astounded by the swiftness of their daring play, while in our hearts we felt safe and secure watching these brilliant bodies disintegrate, knowing somehow we had survived their fall. " - Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke

"In spite of my study, I have learned. Every grand religion begins in light. Yet only hearts hold light. Pages cannot. I have paper in my hands. Give these words to the world and they will be loved and understood by those who already know their truth. The truth doesn't burn. The truth waits for anyone who wishes to find it" - Richard Bach, fully Richard David Bach

"Luck is always waiting for something to turn up. Labor, with keen eyes and strong will, always turns up something. Luck lies in bed and wishes the postman will bring news of a legacy. Labor turns out at six o'clock and with busy pen or ringing hammer, lays the foundation of a competence. Luck whines. Labor whistles. Luck relies on chance, labor on character." - Richard Cobden

"If all our wishes were gratified, most of our pleasures would be destroyed." - Richard Whately

"Perhaps most of us feel that we could accept death for ourselves and for those we love if it did not often seem to come with such untimeliness. But we rebel when it so little considers our wishes or our readiness. But we may well ask ourselves when would we be willing to part with or to part from those we love? And who is there among us whose judgment we would trust to measure out our lives? Such decisions would be terrible for mere men to make. But fortunately we are spared making them; fortunately they are made by wisdom higher than ours. And when death makes its visitations among us, inconsolable grief and rebellious bitterness should have no place. There must be no quarrel with irrevocable facts. Even when death comes by events which seem unnecessary and avoidable. We must learn to accept what we cannot help." - Richard L. Evans, fully Richard Louis Evans

"Into My Own - One of my wishes is that those dark trees, So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze, Were not, as ’twere, the merest mask of gloom, But stretched away unto the edge of doom. I should not be withheld but that some day Into their vastness I should steal away, Fearless of ever finding open land, Or highway where the slow wheel pours the sand. I do not see why I should e’er turn back, Or those should not set forth upon my track To overtake me, who should miss me here And long to know if still I held them dear. They would not find me changed from him they knew— Only more sure of all I thought was true." - Robert Frost

"The more a believer wishes to live the absolute call of God, the more essential it is to do so in the heart of human distress." - Roger Schutz, aka Frère Roger, Brother Roger of Taize, baptised Roger Louis Schütz-Marsauche

"Perseverance gives power to weakness, and opens to poverty the world's wealth. It spreads fertility over the barren landscape, and buds the choicest flowers and fruits spring up and flourish in the desert abode of thorns and briars." - Samuel Griswold Goodrich, better known by pseudonymn Peter Parley

"Thoughts which come at a call Are no better than if they came not at all Neither flower nor fruit, Yielding no root For plant, shrub, or tree. I prize thy gentle heart, Free from ambition, falsehood, or art, And thy good mind, Daily refined, By pure desire To fan the heaven-seeking fire." - Margaret Fuller, fully Sara Margaret Fuller, Marchese Ossoli

"And let all the brothers, both the ministers and servants as well as the others, take care not to be disturbed or angered at the sin or the evil of another, because the devil wishes to destroy many through the fault of one; but they should spiritually help [that one] who has sinned as best they can, because it is not the healthy who are in need of the physician, but those who are sick (Mk. 2:17)." - Saint Francis of Assisi, born Giovanni Francesco di Bernardone NULL

"And let us be very careful of the malice and the subtlety of the Satan, who wishes that a man not raise his mind and heart to God." - Saint Francis of Assisi, born Giovanni Francesco di Bernardone NULL

"And let us refer all good to the most high and supreme lord God, and acknowledge that every good is His, and thank Him for everything, from Whom all good things come. And may He, the Highest and Supreme, Who alone is true God, have and be given and receive every honor and reverence, every praise and blessing, every thanks and glory, for every good is His, He Who alone is good." - Saint Francis of Assisi, born Giovanni Francesco di Bernardone NULL

"The secret consciousness of duty well performed; the public voice of praise that honors virtue, and rewards it; all these are yours." - Saint Francis of Assisi, born Giovanni Francesco di Bernardone NULL